Webster defines a vista as "a view, especially a distant view, through or between intervening objects. But may not one's vistas be memories, with the years acting as "intervening objects"? Has not distance as much to do with time as with space? Vistas in words can no more convey the impression of things seen than Lester Hornby's sketches.
If you want a substitute for Baedeker, please do not read this book! If you want a substitute for photographs, you will be disappointed in Lester's sketches. The monuments of Paris, ticketed by name and historical events to tourists whose eyes have had hardly more time than the camera, known by photographs to prospective tourists who dream of things as yet unseen, are interwoven into the canvas of my life.
The Gare Saint-Lazaire, for instance, is the place where I was lost once as a kid, where I have had to say goodbye to my husband starting on a long and perilous journey, and over which I have seen a Zeppelin floating. Since Louis Philippe was long before my time, the obelisk always has been in the Place de la Concorde.
Where else could the Arc de Triomphe be? Of course it looks like that! I shall not attempt to apologize for the autobiography that comes to the front in my Paris vistas. Perhaps my own insignificance and unimportance and the lack of interest on the part of the public in what I do and thinkβimpressed upon me by more than one critic of earlier volumesβshould deter me from telling how I lived and brought up my family in Paris.
But it is the only way I can tell how I feel about Paris. Whether the end justifies the means the reader must decide for himself. M Y Scotch-Irish grandfather was a Covenanter. He kept his whisky in a high cupboard under lock and key. If any of his children were around when he took his night-cap, he would admonish them against the use of alcohol. When he read in the Bible about Babylon, he thought of Paris. To Grandpa all "foreign places" were pretty bad. But Paris? His children would never go there.
